Lofti Zadeh, the distinguished mathematician, computer scientist, electrical engineer, artificial intelligence researcher, and professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, US, did not know, at one point in time, much about subways. But, he knew the secret of trains, which purred through the outskirts of Sendai, Japan, halting with uncanny precision and saving 10 per cent of the average fuel usage.

Zadeh apparently knew that the trains were working on a set of maxims that made up 'fuzzy logic'.

This was, indeed, the magic word he first 'coined' in the mid-1960s - at a time when conventional logic was the rule, dividing as it did the world into 'yes' and 'no' and black and white.

Zadeh's proposition was classically different: the entire world is in shades of grey. It was something that, he argued, could make computers 'think' like people.

Curiously, the American academic community wasn't impressed. It derided the concept per se, and called fuzzy logic 'futuristic fantasy'. Not so the Japanese, who appreciated the 'logic' of fuzzy logic - this was reason enough why companies like Matsushita and Sony began selling it back to the land of its origin.

Today, fuzzy logic is being extensively used and incorporated in computer technology and a host of other engineering, medical and scientific processes, including high-tech gizmos, aside from household gadgets - making them almost as 'smart' as their owners.

Well, do we not use fuzzy logic to make housework easy? You toss your laundry into a washing machine and push a button - the machine does the rest.

Also, think of the microwave oven that 'watches' over meals, set to cook, with more sensitivity than, perhaps, a human being. In Japan, this has been used for a long time. This is also motivation enough why the technology is fast catching up with reality, what with products applying fuzzy logic now readily available in all markets.

Fuzzy logic is actually not logic that is fuzzy, but logic that describes and tames fuzziness. It is based on the concept that all things are a matter of degree. As a matter of fact, fuzziness underscores, perhaps, the most famous philosophical pattern ever devised: Plato's theory of ideals. The great philosopher was aware of degrees of truth everywhere, and he often reconciled from them. For Plato, to use a simile, no chair was perfect; it was only a chair to a certain degree. Nothing in the world is perfect.

Everything, the great man said, comes with similar grades of imperfection.

It is true that Plato's ideals were not mere intellectual gems over practical sense. They had deep, primary effects. For example, they were able to circumvent, or overcome, the popular notion of essentialism - one of the foremost obstacles to the theory of evolution. Though Plato did, at first, 'blur' all partial contradictions with the sum total, while viewing the harmony between objects as conflict between tall and short, he did visualise the 'light' and re-invent his philosophy.

It was, of course, much later that he redefined 'fuzziness' from existence and altered his perception of the world. This is not all.

Closer home, Hinduism, or India's rich tradition of logic, still 'holds' on to the idea that the physical world is maya, or illusion.

Buddhism, likewise, has distinctly fuzzy elements.

The Buddha was, perhaps, the world's first fuzzy theorist.

His sayings turn the Law of Contradictions unequivocally inside out. Back to Zadeh. Complex systems, as he envisaged, trigger the idea of fuzzy sets. A chair, according to him, distils an array of objects into one central notion.

Furniture, he suggested, summarises it even more broadly, as much as words which define every core concept that may have blurred bounds. He explained that language is 'a system for assigning atomic and composite labels, words, phrases, and sentences' to fuzzy sets. Language is, doubtless, a vast shorthand - the outstanding instance of our natural ability to summarise.

Zadeh (1921-2017) reckoned that fuzzy logic could handle several complexities in a similar way. To illustrate a simple example: when members in a class grow, for instance, they eventually exceed human comprehension. When this happens, the brain subsequently responds by summarising the class into chunks, labelled with words. As Bart Kosko, another fuzzy scholar, put it so logically, 'What makes society turn is science, and the language of science is maths, and the structure of maths is logic, and the bedrock of logic is Aristotle, and that's what goes out with fuzzy'.

How far can fuzzy logic go, you may well ask. According to Kosko, it has led to, or dramatically transformed, present and futuristic scientific 'miracles'.

These include in a nutshell: 1) fuzzy logic enables us to refine the wisdom of every document ever written; 2) smart cars with sonar devices 'pump' the brakes, if the car ahead stops too quickly. With a fuzzy navigator, computerised map, emitters and receivers on asphalt, or concrete roads, such vehicles could drive themselves; 3) robots with human-like repertoire of behaviour; or, computers that understand, feel and respond to normal human language and emotions; 4) machines that write 'prize-winning' novels and screenplays in a selected style, such as Ernest Hemingway's; and, 5) micro-sized, or nano-particles that roam the bloodstream, killing cancer cells and/or slow down aging, among other forays.

Fuzzy logic is playing a pivotal role in therapeutics too -it can, for one, predict response to treatment, or analyse diabetic neuropathy and detect early diabetic retinopathy, breast, lung and prostate cancers.

To pick other examples - fuzzy logic insulin pumps, incubators for premature infants, fuzzy devices to induce the flow of anaesthetics and drugs, heart pacemakers, fuzzy cooling systems for computer workstations and a host of other applications. The list is long; also, fast expanding.

Nidamboor is a wellness physician A version of this article appears in the print on December 27, 2021, of The Himalayan Times.